Butler, Octavia - Dawn

"So what you did is like knocking," she said, and was about to demonstrate knocking for it when the wall began to open. There was a man on the other side, dressed only in a pair of ragged shorts.

She stared at him. A human being-tall, stocky, as dark as she was, clean shaved. He looked wrong to her at first-alien and strange, yet familiar, compelling. He was beautiful. Even if he had been bent and old, he would have been beautiful.

She glanced at Nikanj, saw that it had become statue-still. It apparently had no intention of moving or speaking soon.

"Paul Titus?" she asked.

The man opened his mouth, closed it, swallowed, nodded. "Yes," he said finally.

The sound of his voice-deep, definitely human, definitely male-fed a hunger in her. "I'm Lilith Iyapo," she said. "Did you know we were coming or is this a surprise to you?"

"Come in," he said, touching the wall opening. "I knew. And you don't know how welcome you are." He glanced at Nikanj. "Kaalnikanj oo Jdahyatediinkahguyaht aj Dinso, come in. Thank you for bringing her."

Nikanj made a complex gesture of greeting with its head tentacles and stepped into the room-the usual bare room. Nikanj went to a platform in a corner and folded itself into a sitting position on it. Lilith chose a platform that allowed her to sit almost with her back to Nikanj. She wanted to forget it was there, observing, since it clearly did not intend to do anything but observe. She wanted to give all her attention to the man. He was a miracle-a human being, an adult who spoke English and looked more than a little like one of her dead brothers.

His accent was as American as her own and her mind overflowed with questions. Where had he lived before the war? How had he survived? Who was he beyond a name? Had he seen any other humans? Had he- "Have you really decided to stay here?" she demanded abruptly. It was not the first question she had intended to ask.

The man sat cross-legged in the middle of a platform large enough to be a serving table or a bed.

"I was fourteen when they woke me up," he said. "Everyone I knew was dead. The Oankali said they'd send me back to Earth eventually if I wanted to go. But once I had been here for a while, I knew this was where I wanted to be. There's nothing that I care about left on Earth."

"Everyone lost relatives and Mends," she said. "As far as I know, I'm the only member of my family still alive."

"I saw my father, my brother-their bodies. I don't know what happened to my mother. I was dying myself when the Oankali found me. They tell me I was. I don't remember, but I believe them."

"I don't remember their finding me either." She twisted around. "Nikanj, did your people do something to us to keep us from remembering?"

Nikanj seemed to rouse itself slowly. "They had to," it said. "Humans who were allowed to remember their rescue became uncontrollable. Some died in spite of our care."

Not surprising. She tried to imagine what she had done when in the middle of the shock of realizing that her home, her family, her Mends, her world were all destroyed. She was confronted with a collecting party of Oankali. She must have believed she had lost her mind. Or perhaps she did lose it for a while. It was a miracle that she had not killed herself trying to escape them.

"Have you eaten?" the man asked.

"Yes," she said, suddenly shy.

There was a long silence. "What were you before?" he asked. "I mean, did you work?"

"I had gone back to school," she said. "I was majoring in anthropology." She laughed bitterly. "I suppose I could think of this as fieldwork-but how the hell do I get out of the field?"

"Anthropology?" he said, frowning. "Oh yeah, I remember reading some stuff by Margaret Mead before the war. So you wanted to study what? People in tribes?"

"Different people anyway. People who didn't do things the way we did them."

"Where were you from?" he asked.

"Los Angeles."

"Oh, yeah. Hollywood, Beverly Hills, movie stars. . . . I always wanted to go there."

One trip would have shattered his illusions. "And you were from... ?"

"Denver."

"Where were you when the war started?"

"Grand Canyon-shooting the rapids. That was the first time we'd ever really done anything, gone anywhere really good. We froze afterward. And my father used to say nuclear winter was nothing but politics."

"I was in the Andes in Peru," she said, "hiking toward Machu Picchu. I hadn't been anywhere either, really. At least not since my husband-"

"You were married?"

"Yes. But he and my son. . . were killed-before the war, I mean. I had gone on a study tour of Peru. Part of going back to college. A friend talked me into taking that trip. She went too. . . and died."

"Yeah." He shrugged uncomfortably. "I was sort of looking forward to going to college myself. But I had just gotten through the tenth grade when everything blew up."

"The Oankali must have taken a lot of people out of the southern hemisphere," she said, thinking. "I mean we froze too, but I heard the southern freeze was spotty. A lot of people must have survived."

He drifted into his own thoughts. "It's funny," he said. "You started out years older than me, but I've been Awake for so long. . . I guess I'm older than you are now."

"I wonder how many people they were able to get out of the northern hemisphere-other than the soldiers and politicians whose shelters hadn't been bombed open." She turned to ask Nikanj and saw that it was gone.

"He left a couple of minutes ago," the man said. "They can move really quietly and fast when they want to."

"But-"

"Hey, don't worry. He'll come back. And if he doesn't, I can open the walls or get food for you if you want anything."

"You can?"

"Sure. They changed my body chemistry a little when I decided to stay. Now the walls open for me just like they do for them."

"Oh." She wasn't sure she liked being left with the man this way-especially if he was telling the truth. If he could open walls and she could not, she was his prisoner.

"They're probably watching us," she said. And she spoke in Oankali, imitating Nikanj's voice: "Now let's see what they'll do if they think they're alone."

The man laughed. "They probably are. Not that it matters."

"It matters to me. I'd rather have watchers where I can keep an eye on them, too."

The laughter again. "Maybe he thought we might be kind of inhibited if he stayed around."

She deliberately ignored the implications of this. "Nikanj isn't male," she said. "It's ooloi."

"Yeah, I know. But doesn't yours seem male to you?" She thought about that. "No. I guess I've taken their word for what they are."

"When they woke me up, I thought the ooloi acted like men and women while the males and females acted like eunuchs. I never really lost the habit of thinking of ooloi as male or female."

That, Lilith thought, was a foolish way for someone who had decided to spend his life among the Oankali to think-a kind of deliberate, persistent ignorance.

"You wait until yours is mature," he said. "You'll see what I mean. They change when they've grown those two extra things." He lifted an eyebrow. "You know what those things are?"

"Yes," she said. He probably knew more, but she realized that she did not want to encourage him to talk about sex; not even Oankali sex.

"Then you know they're not arms, no matter what they tell us to call them. When those things grow in, ooloi let everyone know who's in charge. The Oankali need a little women's and men's lib up here."

She wet her lips. "It wants me to help it through its metamorphosis."

"Help it. What did you tell it?"

"I said I would. It didn't sound like much."

He laughed. "It isn't hard. Puts them in debt to you, though. Not a bad idea to have someone powerful in debt to you. It proves you can be trusted, too. They'll be grateful and you'll be a lot freer. Maybe they'll fix things so you can open your own walls."